Bank holiday camping trip in South Devon...

[James]

I braved the Devon roads and the weather over the last Bank Holiday weekend only to find they were clear and clear... two clear nights on the trot! It was a family trip with some friends from the village but I was permitted to pack a camera and tripod! Here's a couple of widefield images taken, both taken with an astro-modified Canon 650D, both are 15x 3min subs tracked using a Vixen Polarie through a 24-105 Sigma lens at 31mm, stacked and processed a bit in Pixinsight - primarily a histogram stretch and a little tweak to try and make the main stars slightly more prominent as they were pretty lost in amongst all the Milky Way stuff.. I need to suss out how to post images on here as both have been a little degraded in quality in posting...

**EDIT**: If you actually click on the image, the image displayed is of much better quality

I won't even try to list of the DSO's visible in there but I do like the Veil nebula showing down at the bottom  and the North America Nebula is particularly prominent.

The second image below is centred roughly on Cassiopeia and shows the Milky Way from Perseus at the bottom through Cepheus at the top. Again, there's loads of DSO's visible starting with the Heart & Soul Nebula's at the bottom (and the Double Cluster) through to the Elephants Trunk region at the top. 

I've added a couple of really widefield images too - the first is from a time-lapse taken at the campsite with me setting up the modded camera on the left in a sea of red light, the second from later in the night from another timelapse with the Milky Way heading down to the east.

 

 

For anyone heading down to Devon for a spot of camping we were at Woodlands Caravan and Campsite which has a park attached with loads of rides etc for the kids (and grown ups). Aside from being really popular with my kids the campsite itself is a few miles to the west of Dartmouth and is very dark. The view to the northeast has lights from Torquay/Torbay/Paignton etc and Dartmouth is noticable to the east but there's nothing south and the nearest LP in the west comes from Plymouth something like 20-25 miles away (you can see a little of that in the last image - it wasn't noticeable with the naked eye). The campsite themselves don't take the "lets put lots of streetlights up to make people feel at home" approach either so parts of the campsite are really really dark. So, if you get the chance and are bringing family along for summer hols see if you can pack a scope/camera

James

[Stu]

Lovely images James, I love the widefield with the NAN and Veil in it, two of my favourite objects.

Must have a look into that campsite, Devon is a great place to camp.

[James]

There's a fair number of places down here and in Cornwall that are dark as the proverbial  If you can just get the weather....

 

[mikeskor]

Really excellent images. Thanks for sharing.

[Astroscot2]

Cracking wide field images James,.  lovely tight stars ..

[laudropb]

Very nice images.